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Digital ad spending has increased exponentially in recent years. According to a 2016 study by eMarketer, social ad spending alone accounted for $15.36 billion (that’s billion with a “b”) or 21.3% of the year’s total digital ad spend.

“But what about Mad Men? Why are ad dollars slowly but surely shifting away from television and print?”

For brands, simply posting on the platform isn’t enough. Facebook’s dynamic algorithm makes it so that you must pay to reach your patrons. With that in mind, let’s bring the title of this blog full circle.

Here are “Three Easy Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Ad Campaigns.”

1. Build it from scratch.

The first step is the hardest. To start, you have to make a decision: either 1) boost your post or 2) build an ad campaign from scratch. Both are similar when it comes to targeting the right audience. The real difference is control.

When you build your campaign from scratch, you can control the bidding strategy, the platforms, and even the devices it shows up on. If you know when your audience is online and active, you can have it run only during that time period to save ad dollars. Most importantly, from an analyst’s perspective, building from scratch keeps all the data organized. Nothing makes reporting easier than organized data.

2. Understand and define your objective.

With more control comes more responsibility. As you’re building your campaign from scratch, it’s important to choose a clear and definable objective. Ask yourself, “What do I want to accomplish and why am I doing this?”

Facebook currently offers three categories: awareness, consideration, and conversion. Under those categories, there are eleven subcategories. If your goal is to create positive brand sentiment over time, you could use “Traffic” and drive people to a website, or “Video Views” and visually explain why you’re the best at what you do.

Lately, we’ve been setting up a lot of conversion campaigns, which brings us to our next point (spoiler alert).

3. Track your conversions.

Full disclosure: this requires light coding. Don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it sounds, especially if you have Google Tag Manager in place.

You’re building a campaign from scratch and your objective is conversions. First, choose the event you want to track. If you choose one of Facebook’s recommended events, the platform algorithm will do the heavy lifting for you. Second, send yourself the code and plug it into Google Tag Manager. Last, take the brand new pixel for a test drive and make sure it’s working properly.

The campaign is set and the conversion tracking is in place. Now you just need content so you can press GO. When designing and writing your ad, keep in mind the Facebook relevancy score and size of your audience because both will effect your cost-per-click (CPC). The sweet spot you’re looking for is where a low cost-per-click meets quality clicks. And wah-lah. It’s that easy.

Go forth, optimize your Facebook ad campaigns, and squeeze everything you possibly can out of your digital ad budget. The future belongs to brands that make it their mission to learn and evolve on a daily basis.

Have something to add? We’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments below.